Secret Garden

Our garden here in Manchester's surrounded by red brick walls, some of them crumbling a little. There's a mature magnolia tree that blossoms in March and August, with those flowers that my friend Alicia always says look little china cups and saucers. There are hidden corners and chairs and firs and squirrels everywhere and cats doing pasaggiata along the fences and down the paths. It's a kind of hidden-away garden, tucked amongst lots of others besides the railway lines south of Piccadilly. Right now it's too chilly to sit in, and carpeted in leaf mulch and conkers. It's maybe still warm enough to take out a cup of spicy tea and do some crunching about in the untamed grass for about ten minutes.

I think I love walled gardens and things going a little unkempt because I loved Frances Hodgson Burnett's 'The Secret Garden' so much. When I sit out in ours, any time of year, I get that same sensation of belonging to something and being settled somewhere that Mary gets. It was the same feeling in our garden in Norwich, which was smaller and even more hemmed in and secret. J. laboured like mad to make that into a little oasis. He built trellis fences and mounded curtains of honeysuckle. We had glowing lamps and blazing torches. We had Chilean potato blossom - which was rife all over the city's gardens, as were passion flowers, dark purple and notched like clockfaces growing on the vine.

Our teacher read us 'The Secret Garden' when I was ten. She read out every word and, coming from Yorkshire, did all the accents with great aplomb. She was a teacher very big on nature. We visited woodlands and wild fowl parks. We tramped about down the Burn, picking wild flowers and observing the pertinent features of things. I pored over the Observer Books of this that and the other.

She wasn't my favourite teacher, the one we had that year. My favourites were Mrs Saferi the music teacher who looked like Barbra Straisand, and Miss Booth who we had the following year. But this particular teacher chose wonderful books to read us. 'The Secret Garden' I remember best, but there was also both Dodie Smith dalmation books and two of the later Narnias. All year I was agog at the point in the day when it was time to listen to the teacher reading to us. I loved it and I think it's partly why I still love hearing people read now. That point in the day when all the maths and science and stuff was finished with and it was time for stories.

Speaking of which - we're just back from the Whitworth Gallery, and the Northern Salt reading. Very nice to sit and listen to four Salt authors do their stuff in such a lovely setting - those tall windows and the chilly park beyond. I met again some lovely people I've met before, such as Elizabeth Baines, Ailsa Cox and Mark Illis. And I met Jen Hamilton-Emery from Salt for the first time, which was a treat. She presented me with the first copies of my book of short fiction, 'Twelve Stories.' It was like magic! There it was, twelve years in the making.

Tonight at home we're settling down with the fire going for a quiet night. J's bringing in the firewood and battening down the hatches. Time to cook and to feed Fester, who's jangling all the bling he wears round his neck, and calling for catfood.

Oh! The other picture above is the Raoul Dufy painting I mentioned the other day: my favourite painting in the world, I think. It's called 'La Vie en Rose' - I got the name wrong the other day. I've had a print for about twenty years and saw it in the flesh in Paris a few years ago. It was colossal. It was a room big enough to walk into.